by Ann Troup
Sure enough, she found her own birth certificate, and his and Rachel’s marriage certificate. No death certificate. Just a pile of letters addressed to HM Prison, Dartmoor.
She opened one and realised that they were the letters her mother had sent to him in prison. She opened more, scanning the handwriting and seeing that some were from her gran too. Only one envelope stood out from the others – it was stiff and large, addressed to their house, so more recent than the rest. It was from a London solicitor, from Rachel’s solicitor, warning Charlie not to contact or visit or they would have no alternative but to apply for an injunction against him. ‘My client has no wish for further contact with you,’ she read.
The letter was dated fifteen years ago when Amy had been five. Rachel had been alive and hadn’t wanted to see them. Hadn’t wanted to know her own daughter. The woman had gone so far as to threaten legal action if Charlie even tried.
If Amy’s mood had been angry before, this discovery only served to fuel the flames. Now she was incandescent! Her mother was alive and it looked like she was a complete bitch. What kind of woman walked away from her own child? Anger gave way to a swathe of hurt that scythed through her and nearly took her off her feet. Mind reeling, she tried to absorb what it all meant, what it said about her – Amy – the child her mother didn’t want. The sensation of abject sorrow was too much to bear and she had to shut the feeling away and cling onto the anger.
Not that she knew who it was for yet: the mother she’d believed was dead, her father for the lie, or her gran. But you didn’t get angry with Gran. Life wasn’t worth living if you got on her wrong side. As much as she was loving and kind, she could turn, and when she turned, she turned nasty. No, Gran wasn’t the one she could run to, not about this. Not about anything that challenged her cosy world. Now that she had locked the emotions down, she could be rational and work out what she needed to do. Because she had to do something.
Rachel’s address was etched into her mind. It was simple. She would go there and confront the woman who had faked her own death to abandon her family. Amy wanted to know why, and she wanted to know now.
Back in the house it took only moments to look up train times and find that if she was quick she could be on a train in forty-five minutes and in London an hour and a half after that. She took the letters and stuffed them in her backpack. She also took her father’s secret stash of cash. Five hundred pounds, rolled up and secured with an elastic band and kept hidden in a piece of spare waste pipe in the back of the sink unit cupboard. He thought she didn’t know about it, but she had watched him many a time unscrew the dummy pipe and store his money. He owed her for all this, so she wasn’t going to feel bad about taking it.
As she headed across the sitting room towards the door, she looked towards the mantelpiece and saw the photograph of her father holding her. She had been about four and was sitting on his shoulders and they were both grinning at the camera. It was a mutual favourite picture and she couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been on display somewhere in the house. The sight of it stirred the feelings she was trying so hard to suppress.
She picked up the picture and hurled it against the wall, wincing as the image shattered, littering the floor with tiny shards of glass. She was sick of it! It wasn’t real. None of it had been real. Not this house, not her dad, not this life. For good measure, she followed the picture with the plate of cold pizza, watching in satisfaction as it slid slowly down the wall, leaving a trail of cold congealed gunk in its wake.
Satisfied, she stalked from the house, slamming the front door so hard that the glass pane at the top cracked from the impact.
Chapter 10
For a moment or two, Rachel thought that Charlie might hit her. She would have let him. It would be well deserved.
He was breathing hard, gritting his jaw and biting down against all the things he so obviously wanted to say. He was clenching his fists and it looked to Rachel as if he was barely stopping himself from tearing the place apart and leaving her life in as many tatters as she’d once left his.
She watched him, warily, fighting the urge to shift away from him and run for the door. ‘Tell me about Amy. What’s she like? And I know I don’t deserve to know.’ The desire to know something of her child fought gamely with her fear of his anger and she hoped that thoughts of Amy would divert his brewing rage.
He sighed, the tension rapidly ebbing away, leaving him deflated, exhausted, done. Shaking his head as if to fling off the last shreds of his temper he said, ‘She’s like you to look at.’
Rachel was disappointed at this; she didn’t want her daughter to be anything like her. She wanted to hear that Amy was brave, intelligent, capable and full of life. ‘Does she have friends? Is she happy?’
‘She’s happy enough; she’s at college, training to be a nurse. There are plenty of friends, no boyfriends, or at least none that I know of, not that she would tell me. She’s a good kid.’
‘You always were good at scaring off unwanted boyfriends,’ she said, a sad smile turning up the corners of her mouth.
He jammed his hands in his pockets and gritted his teeth again. ‘Let’s not attempt small talk eh?’ She saw that he knew exactly what she was talking about. With a look telling her that he was in no mood for gentle reminiscing, he walked away from her, out into the hallway and into the sitting room.
Lila’s presence in the flat was stronger than Rachel’s, even though Lila had been dead for twenty years. Rachel watched him come under the spell as he touched the spines of her books, peered at photographs, and breathed in the scent of the undead past.
He still wore his wedding ring. She hadn’t kept hers; she’d left it behind on Delia’s kitchen table the day she’d left. It was a bid to help him to hate her, help him move on, have a life. Nevertheless, here he was waiting for her to tell him the truth. It wasn’t going to happen. The truth was a story no one should ever have to know. But she owed him something, and she needed him to leave and never come back.
‘After I had Amy the fits got worse – you know that. I was scared I would hurt her, drop her, harm her – I don’t know, but I couldn’t cope. I thought she would be better off without me. You both would. I was a liability,’ she said, unable to look at his face.
Charlie didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at her, standing in her mausoleum of a flat, looking like some gawky kid and expecting him to believe everything she said. She ought to have known him better than that, but she’d had to try.
He shook his head and gave a wry laugh. ‘Bullshit!’
Rachel was floundering; she needed him to leave. ‘Look, you only married me because I was pregnant with Amy then you realised you couldn’t even leave me on my own with her. What kind of life was that, for any of us? I was grateful you took me on, but I grew up and realised it was never going to work. That’s it, all there is to say. You should thank me; I did us all a favour.’
Charlie’s jaw fell in disbelief. ‘Christ! You’re just like the rest of them! What is this? The Porter curse or something?’ he shouted, throwing his hands into the air. She flinched away from him, which only served to make him even angrier. He strode towards the door. ‘Do us both a real favour, Rachel. Don’t come back, not ever. OK?’
Rachel winced as the door slammed. One of Lila’s bone china plates wobbled and fell off the dresser, smashing irretrievably on the kitchen floor. When she was sure Charlie wasn’t coming back, she bent to pick up the pieces, struggling to breathe as the knot of pain in her chest started to unravel, releasing nineteen years of grief and anguish as it unfurled. The pain of it made her gasp.
She grasped one of the slivers of broken china, squeezing it hard, hoping that the sharp, cutting sensation would cancel out the choking emotional agony. White light shot through her brain as the pain hit, shorting out the capacity for further thought as an almighty seizure took hold and brought her down.
***
Charlie gunned the van, screeching away from the building
like a man possessed and frightening the living crap out of a gang of drunks who were serenading the neighbourhood on their way home.
He didn’t care if the police pulled him over; he didn’t care if he lost control and went crashing into the nearest lamppost. All he knew at that moment was that Rachel was right; she had done them all a favour.
His temper was still white-hot when he reached the M4.
***
Amy’s train had come to a complete standstill, literally grinding to a halt in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere. All she could see when she tried to peer out of the window was her own face staring back at her, the glass a mirror in the pitch-black night.
The carriage was almost empty – just a few passengers staring at each other and shrugging with confusion at the delay. Amy had two seats to herself and was glad she wasn’t opposite anyone who might want to engage her in conversation. Just in case, she stared at the floor in a deliberate attempt to avoid potential eye contact. Had the station shop been open she would have bought a magazine and hidden behind that, but everything had been closed when she got there, even her ticket had come out of a machine. Hers was the last train, so not even a buffet car. She was stuck.
Then she remembered the letters.
Fate had presented her with an opportunity to look through them before she got to London. Knowledge was power, and if she intended to confront her mother, a little power wouldn’t go amiss.
She rummaged in her bag for the bundle of letters just as an announcement came over the speakers telling them all that there was a delay up ahead and that the train would be moving again as soon as they could resolve the problem. She opened the first letter to a chorus of grumblings and sighs from her fellow passengers.
To her disappointment, the letter was from her gran, but its contents were quite interesting. ‘Rachel comes to see me most days, calls in after school. I can’t say I blame her not wanting to go home to those nutcases. Although she seems a bit brighter now Roy has gone. I still can’t get over that, him just up and leaving like he did. I thought he would hang in there until the bitter end. Still, given what he was up to with poor Patsy I can’t say I’m sorry he’s gone, even though it should be him behind bars and not you. Anyway, little Rachel sends her love, poor kid!”
The rest of the letter was of no interest to Amy, just her gran wittering on about the price of meat and what colour she was going to paint the lounge. Some things never changed. The date was interesting though: 14th April 1978. She pulled out the marriage certificate and checked Rachel’s date of birth. When the letter was written, her mother would have been eleven years old.
Until this point Amy hadn’t known that her mother was one of the Porter family. She hadn’t connected the dots and hadn’t realised that Rachel had been entangled in what had happened to Charlie. How stupid she’d been. Never asking any questions, just blithely going through life thinking that everything was just tragic and lovely, and that everyone in it was fundamentally OK. All this time and she’d not even been curious. What the hell was that all about? Was she an idiot?
She tore open the next letter – this time dated 1979 – and scanned the page looking for a mention of Rachel in the mundane ramblings of her gran’s scrawl. ‘Rachel still visits. She’s growing up fast, and I don’t suppose you would even recognise her now. Still, she sends her love, always asks after you.’
And so they went on, letter after letter, marking the years of her father’s incarceration with nothing more than a few flimsy pages. Rachel was made to sound wonderful: a girl who blossomed over the years, who was sweet, charming and kind. This Rachel did not sound like the type of person who would abandon her child. Wonderful, lovely Rachel growing up delightful, despite her monster family.
Then the last letter, when Rachel was eighteen: ‘I can’t tell you how upset I am. Rachel came today. It had been raining, came down in bloody buckets, so by the time she got here she was soaked to the skin. Well, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that wet, so – like you do – I got her to strip off her wet things.
‘Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m that upset I have to tell someone. Anyway, I made her take her blouse off, and you’ve never seen anything like it! That bloody bitch of a woman has been beating her with a belt. That poor kid has scars all over her back. You can see the buckle marks where the skin is broken. I couldn’t believe it. I knew Valerie Porter was a bitter woman, but I never thought she would do that to a kid. I tell you, it was all I could do to stop myself going round there and taking the belt to the old bitch myself!’
Amy stopped reading, her head full of the picture that her gran had described. Then she turned the page, only to find that the prison censor had blocked the words out in heavy black ink. The whole page had obviously been screwed up at some point, and then smoothed back out. She guessed that was her father’s doing. He must have read it and lost his cool, being stuck in a cell where he could do nothing about it.
There were no more letters because in ten years he’d only kept those that mentioned Rachel. Amy didn’t want to dwell on it. Something about a grown man, her own father, being that fascinated by a kid bothered her. She stuffed the letters back in her bag and stared back at the window, trying to look beyond her own frowning face.
If she did the maths, her dad was fifteen years older than Rachel. That would be like her going out with Chris Hemsworth, or Sam Worthington. It didn’t seem quite so perverse when she thought about it like that. Plenty of girls went out with older blokes. One of the girls in college was knocking off a lecturer, and if looks were anything to go by, her dad had a good ten years on him. Still, she wasn’t related to them.
What did it matter anyway? It wasn’t the reason Rachel had abandoned her, and it wasn’t the reason her gran and Charlie had lied to her. The only thing that was clear was that her gran had loved Rachel, and so had her dad, so God knows what had gone so wrong that they would rather pretend she was dead. As soon as the damned train got moving she would be closer to finding out what it was, straight from the horse’s mouth.
Chapter 11
Mary Hammond sat down, sighed heavily, and kicked off her shoes under the desk. If time were on her side she’d get a glance at the morning paper before the day shift got in. Although she would be lucky – the patients had been buzzing all night. God knows what got into them all sometimes. One would start then the rest had to get on the bandwagon too.
When she’d taken the job as Night Sister on the unit, she’d hoped it would be an easy ride, but this lot were like night owls, perking up as soon as the sun went down. Lunatic was the right word – all lively when the moon was out. She had only just managed to get Bill Smith back in his bed, and to manage that she’d had to ply him with Ovaltine and force a couple of sleeping tablets down his neck.
Something was upsetting him. Usually he was the least of her worries on nights, but referring to his notes she saw that he hadn’t been much better during the day lately either. What with that and the students kicking off at each other, things weren’t particularly rosy in the workplace. That was one thing about regular nights: no snot-nosed students to deal with.
She’d met the lad, Nick, who was a bit of an arsehole in her opinion. Thought he was God’s gift to nursing and had all the answers, she thought with a smug smile on her face. Give him a couple of years and he’d know the score. There were no cures in this game. She’d met kids like him before. Secretly they’d wanted to be doctors but hadn’t made the grade – or didn’t have the stamina. So, they’d try their hands at nursing, throw their weight about, and call the shots.
Mary had a good cure for uppity students. She’d send them around the ward with a trolley full of enemas then send them back half an hour later with the bedpans to deal with the fallout. That usually shut them up. It gave a whole new meaning to a shit day at work, she thought with a chuckle.
The girl student, Amy, was all right: worked hard and she was willing to learn. What a shame that she was th
e one sent home. No one would have missed the cocky boy.
Christ, her back was aching. If she’d changed one wet bed that night, she’d changed a dozen. What with that, and Bill wandering up and down all night babbling rubbish, she had just about had enough. Stroll on home time. Still, she had better write up the case notes while she had the chance. It didn’t look like she was going to get to the paper after all.
The trouble with trying to get your brain to work at five in the morning was that it always wanted to wander off and think about things that weren’t relevant to what you were trying to do. Despite the fact that he was now securely in his bed, Bill Smith kept on walking into her head.
She could remember the first time she had ever met him on the day he’d arrived at the unit. He had been a street drinker, living for years in doorways and derelict hovels. He had stunk to high heaven and was as mad as a box of frogs. The official diagnosis was of Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. But the thing that had always puzzled everyone was his voice. Regardless of the content of his bizarre ramblings, his voice had the cultured lilt of an educated man. It jarred on Mary’s worldview that an educated person should end up on the streets; she was of the liberal persuasion that a good education cured all social ills.
The police had brought him in. He was sectioned because he posed a risk to both himself and others, having acquired the habit of launching himself in front of oncoming cars and occasionally harassing young women, believing them to be his relatives. It was Mary’s impression that the police had been hoping that one of the cars would have finished him off and solved their problem, but fate had not chosen to dispose of Bill so neatly.
So, the NHS was stuck with him. The man with no past, and certainly no future. A mystery – so much so that they weren’t even sure that Bill Smith was an accurate name. The William bit was right. He responded to that but the Smith part had been adopted by the police as a convenient way of filling in all the boxes on the paperwork.
